Microsoft might not have unveiled the Surface Pro 5 in 2016, but it looks like the 2-in-1 might become even more impressive than its predecessors. For those thinking that Microsoft isn’t going to be announcing a successor to its flagship hybrid were mistaken, as an online reference to the product has popped up.

According to the Reference, Microsoft and Its Employees Have Been Working on the Surface Pro 5 for a Long Period of Time

Taking a look at the image below, the date has started from June 2016, suggesting that the software giant’s employees have been working on the 2-in-1 for quite some time now. This would indicate that we can expect some hefty improvements from the machine, so let us hope that it is better in every way in comparison to the company’s Surface Pro 4. The analog speech design team is currently working on the Surface Pro 5, meaning that speech recognition could be heavily improved like it has on the macOS version of Siri that’s running on MacBooks running Apple’s latest and greatest software.

We expect that the base model of Surface Pro 5 will come outfitted with a Core M Kaby Lake chip, followed by Core i5 and i7 variants in the near future, plus with a magnetic charging stylus. One of the things that have been reported to separate Surface Pro 4 and Surface Pro 5 is a higher resolution on the latter.

Rumor has it that the upcoming Windows 10-powered slate will feature a 4K display, which will no doubt improve visual quality, but will have tremendous negative ramifications on the overall battery life and we believe that the role of Kaby Lake processors has been made exactly for that; to conserve battery life while being able to take part in several taxing multitasking options.

We also feel that just like its predecessor, Surface Pro 5 will be void of a GPU, since a thin tablet like that will neither possess the thickness nor the proper dissipation method to get rid of heat being generated by a NVIDIA or AMD GPU. A Type-C USB port (providing support for Thunderbolt 3) is also expected to be present on the tablet that will provide the functions of both charging the tablet and transferring data to and from the slate at an alarmingly fast rate, along with providing the machine with eGPU support.